Movies.

`Two Lane Blacktop,' Road Film Of The 1970s, Still Roars Along

November 01, 1996|By Michael Wilmington, Tribune Movie Critic.

"Two Lane Blacktop," hailed as an American movie masterpiece before it opened, dismissed as a failure months later and unavailable even on video for decades, has been a cult movie for so many years that we shouldn't be surprised that its 25th anniversary has rolled around -- or even, perhaps, that a special 35 mm archival print of Monte Hellman's film has arrived at Facets Multimedia for a one-week run.

Yet it is surprising. The movie doesn't quit. And it doesn't age. I've seen it twice -- when it opened in 1971 and five years ago on TV in Los Angeles -- and it has stayed in my mind with a fierce persistence few movies can manage. Something about "Two Lane Blacktop's" mood -- bitter, spare, mordant, fixated on the absurdity of life -- seems to have acted both to alienate its original mass audiences and help keep its cult ones.

The movie centers on an outlaw car race from Arizona to Washington, D.C., between a souped-up 1955 Chevy and a black Pontiac GTO, and it's so spare and existential that none of the characters have names. They're identified by their roles: James Taylor and Dennis Wilson are the Chevy's Driver and Mechanic, Laurie Bird, passenger and bedmate for both, is simply The Girl. And the GTO's driver, played by Warren Oates, is simply GTO.

The prize of the race is ownership of both cars. And during its course, we see motels, gas stations, truckstops and wide open spaces: the depopulated American West in the Vietnam era, empty and menacing as some vast Indian burial ground.

Though the characters talk -- GTO is especially gabby -- we learn little from them. The duel for the cars is like John Huston's movie search for the Sierra Madre's treasure: deeply symbolic and practically meaningless.

As the two taciturn younger men interact with the Girl, the GTO driver keeps picking up hitchhikers (including Harry Dean Stanton) and regaling them with a series of contradictory recollections that are all clearly lies. Reinventing himself constantly, he wants to dominate his passengers, play with their heads. So the past we hear in "Two Lane Blacktop" is usually false. We're forced into the present, the race, the duel -- all becoming absurd and empty, too.

Co-written by novelist-screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, it's a stark, stripped down story -- as elemental and bony as an old blues song or a Mondrian painting. And it tries to translate a European sensibility, of Albert Camus or Franz Kafka in books and Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman in movies, to an American landscape.

So there's no way you can accuse "Two Lane Blacktop" of over-commercialism, even though two of its leads -- Taylor and Wilson -- were among 1971's big rock stars, Taylor for his songwriting and solo albums and the late Wilson as the Beach Boys' singer-drummer. Typically, neither sings for the film's soundtrack.

It's Oates who is the movie's real star. Even in 1971, his performance was regarded as a masterwork, albeit unrecognized by the Motion Picture Academy.

A wiry actor with burning dark eyes, a gnarled face and a wolfish smile, Oates mostly played secondary villains through the '60s. By 1971, he was best known for his work as a deputy in "In the Heat of the Night" and several parts for Sam Peckinpah, especially as Lyle, the crazier of the two Gorch brothers in "The Wild Bunch." But he had already appeared in Hellman's 1965 western "The Shooting," written by and starring the pre-"Easy Rider" Jack Nicholson, and he would appear in two more -- including "Cockfighter," where he's speechless -- before his premature death by heart attack in 1982.

Hellman himself was one of the last American directorial discoveries of the French magazine Cahiers du Cinema in the 1960s, before it went Marxist, theoretical and anti-Hollywood for a few years. He was picked out for "The Shooting" and another Jack Nicholson western shot at the same time, "Ride in the Whirlwind."

These little movies, low-budget efforts with ambition, had a mood reminiscent of the art films then coming from Eastern Europe, heavily if cryptically critical of the arid society around them. What "Two Lane Blacktop" is really about is the betrayal or inversion of the American dream felt by many during the Vietnam years. And as with some Bergman movies of the '60s and early '70s, it portrayed despair without redemption.

Obviously, it wasn't a hit. But, oddly enough, the basic idea and story structure of "Two Lane Blacktop" later proved a commercial gold mine. It was copied endlessly, most notably in the whole "Gumball Rally"-"Cannonball Run" genre, and the 1977 box-office superhit, "Smokey and the Bandit."

While some of the second-generation road movies are interesting, few have retained the hypnotic force of "Two Lane Blacktop," an intense curio of a troubled era. Like Oates and Hellman, it may never win a huge audience, but its small one is secure.